There is no free storage available anywhere for more than a handful of photos and videos. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and SmugMug have different plans (they all charge) that don’t involve deleting your cloud photos if you’ve gotten rid of them from your phone. All of us need to pay more attention to backup strategies. We’re all taking more photos and videos than ever before, in higher resolution, and the fact is, we outgrow our phone’s storage all the time. You can make the switch from high to low by clicking “optimize” in the Settings section, under your name at the top of the screen.
In Apple’s world, you don’t delete images off the phone, you just convert them to low-resolution copies, and download the high-resolution originals from iCloud. Remember the old Apple ad asking us to “Think Different?” It’s the same thing when it comes to backup.
Apple’s help support reps told me over several calls that iCloud is meant for backup of your devices, not just your photo library, and as a way to have the same data available on all your Apple devices, not just the iPhone.Īs Apple puts it: “Automatically upload and safely store all your photos and videos in iCloud so you can browse, search and share from any of your devices.” Notice the word backup doesn’t appear there anywhere? How Apple Wants the Process to Work
For pure long-term photo backup, because of these weird, arcane rules, Apple’s iCloud is about the worst place to go because it is not designed for that.